2014 Mens Chess Championship Tournament – FIDE Chooses Sochi

FIDE Tournament Host Selection

Perhaps you had a bad case of triskaidekaphobia  and missed last Friday’s announcement that the Men’s 2014 Chess Championship will be held in Sochi this November. The re-match between Magnus Carlsen & Viswanathan Anand will be hosted in Sochi.

The agreement between Putin and Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (FIDE President) will perhaps salvage Sochi’s reputation after all of the Olympic insults about it being less than suitable, unfinished site. This tournament will also be juxtaposed against the political climate since Russia annexed Crimea after Sochi Olympics.

The chess tournament  is also going to be challenged by Russian finances, as the Bloomberg article indicates that Russia needs to add an extra  $58 Billion to ease their bank system’s funding shortage putting  at least one bank:

Sberbank is between Scylla and Charybdis  

— an analyst at BCS Financial Group

Toss in a former chess champion, Russian Activist, Garry Kasparov (Га́рри Ки́мович Каспа́ров) and this tournament has all the making of another drama that could blow up in the face of FIDE and/or Putin. Stanczyk loves Slavic dramas!

Vladimir Putin and Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (FIDE)

‘Twas A Very Putin Christmas … #Poem, #Politics, #Putin

‘Twas the night before Sochi and all thru the Gulag not a prisoner was stirring … Then Putin was visited thrice in succession by Shades of Olympics Past, Present & the Latter.

Then there arose up on the Kremlin with such a clatter:

“Go Green Peace, Khordorkovsky, out Pussy Riot, begone miscreants all … I’ve turned a new leaf!  Now Dash away, dash away all.”

Let there be cheap gas for the Ukraine and all will be well. Let the Patriarch ring our Christmas Bell, I have an Olympics to sell.

I will greet the US delegation with great, gay cheer … “What, Lindsay Graham is not here?”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/20/pussy-riot-khodorkovsky-vladimir-putin-russia

Family Search Website – Free Central / Eastern European Records – #Genealogy, #Slavic

Stanczyk was checking out the family search  European Holdings for Slavic record counts / images to see what progress was made up through 2011.

It is good if your heritage includes the Germanic peoples or locales which were previously under their dominion. Do not get me wrong. I am thrilled that there  now over a million Polish records/images online or indexed at FamilySearch.org.

Country	Records	Percentage
Austria	196,940	0.37
Czech Republic	85,469	0.16
Germany	50,998,675	96.98
Hungary	Browsable Images Only	0.00
Poland	1,002,155	1.91
Russia	303,146	0.58
Slovakia	Browsable Images Only	0.00
Ukraine	14,143	0.03
TOTALS:	52,586,385

We have the ability to better. Please consider volunteering as an indexer. You can start and stop and start again, your  volunteering at any time. Find out more at indexing.familysearch.org. Every little bit helps. Stanczyk managed to do over 150 records this year. Genealogy is collaborative. Helping each other, we also help ourselves. Please pitch in — make this part of your Random Act of Genealogical Kindness efforts.